January 08, 2019: Annual Review 2018-Outlook 2019

Siegen. Fine art photographer Thomas Kellner (Bonn, 1966) looks back on an eventful year 2018. In 30 exhibitions, solo and group shows and fair participations Kellner once again presented his work to the whole world. He displayed his exhibitions Black & White and Tango Metropolis with his well-known contact sheets, but he also presented a new series of linocuts and works from the series flucticulus. Kellner as well presented a new series of pinhole works in his exhibition “Landscape that remembers” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Siegen, Germany. For the 20th anniversary of Thomas Kellner’s studio in Siegen, the artist displayed a new and especially worth seeing piece of art, a photograph of the Grand Canyon. The fine art photographer’s studio was the birthplace of a new curated exhibition called “Picture Architecture”. Kellner successfully showed this work in Chinese Hefei. Photo Trouvée, another curated exhibition Kellner already showed at the photo festival in Pingyao, will come to his studio in Siegen in early February. The connections to the sister city Deyang led Thomas Kellner to the next largest city in Chengdu for lectures and workshops at the university there and an exhibition of his series Black & White in the Gao Xiaohua Museum. Kellner's collection was honored with an exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin and the artist participated in the founding of a patron group at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Siegen to support the collection of photography in his hometown. At the beginning of the year the new catalog flucticulus was published and is already available in the bookstores. In 2018 the European Photography featured Kellner’s series “The most desired man”, which was created for the FAZ-Magazine and the West German TV WDR produces a documentary focusing on Kellner's life as an artist. 2018 left the local arts association “Arbeitsgemeinschaft Siegerländer Künstler”. However, 2018 also led him through France, Poland, the USA, Brazil, Australia, China, Romania, Poland and the Netherlands with his exhibitions. In 2019 several books about Kellner's work are planned. 2019 will be a logistically interesting year when four different exhibitions tour Eschweiler, Brühl, Dresden, Leipzig, Münster, Siegen, Bath and Johannesburg. Currently Thomas Kellner’s biggest concern is the loss of his studio in Siegen. The purchase of a small building with a shop in the Siegen’s upper town failed and therefore the fine art photographer is now forced to liquidate his studio in the Friedrichstrasse. In 2019 there will be monthly events and presentations to significantly reduce the inventory and find a new location that is now being searched within a radius of 50 kilometers.